Daraya reborn: the rebels rebuilding Syria's deserted city |
Like a ghost in the night, Bilal Shorba, the artist they call the "Syrian Banksy", slipped through the rubble of Daraya to paint his murals, praying that Bashar al-Assad's gunners wouldn't spot him.
Returning from exile to one of the devastated cradles of the Syrian revolution -- the only city that lost its entire population during the near-14-year civil war -- he was amazed that some of his work had survived.
On the wall of a destroyed house, one of his bullet-riddled murals, "The Symphony of the Revolution", shows its tragic evolution from non-violent idealism to unrelenting death -- a woman plays the violin as pro- and anti- Assad gunmen all take aim at her with their Kalashnikovs.
Its very survival is "a victory", said Shorba, 31. Despite the massacres, despite Assad forcing the people of Daraya from their homes, "despite our exile, these simple murals have remained, and the regime is gone", he said.
Daraya occupies a special place in the story of the Syrian revolution.
Only seven kilometres (four miles) from the capital Damascus and within sight of Assad's sprawling presidential palace, its people handed roses to the soldiers who were sent to quell their peaceful protests in March 2011.
But they paid a heavy price for their defiance. At least 700 were killed in one of the worst massacres of the war in August 2012, when soldiers went from house to house executing anyone they found.
A horrendous four-year siege followed, with the city starved, shelled and pummelled with barrel bombs, till Assad's forces broke the resistance in 2016 and emptied the city of its people.
Not a single one of its 250,000 pre-war inhabitants was allowed to stay, and many were forced into exile.
Shorba came to Daraya from nearby Damascus in 2013 to join the rebels, armed with nothing more than "clothes for two or three days, pencils, a sketchbook" and a copy of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" in Arabic.
He stayed for three years, enduring the siege and the bombardment, eating weeds and wild herbs to survive, until he and the other fighters were evacuated with the remaining residents to the rebel-held northwest of Syria in August 2016.
He eventually made his way to neighbouring Turkey where he honed his art.
There is much to do in Daraya now he's back. But Shorba wants to start by painting over the giant murals glorifying the Assad clan that still stare down from the walls.
- Not waiting to be helped -
Women, children and those men who could prove they were not involved with the opposition were slowly allowed to trickle back to Daraya from 2019. But most men had to wait till after the fall of Assad on December 8, 2024.
Many have since returned -- doctors,........